In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AFTER LEARNING FROM HISTORY 435
expressed and conceptually controlled. This is why, in the sense of our
definition of "event," the collapse of codes implies a potential for
change, and why it would be wrong to see this collapse exclusively from
the perspective of loss and malfunction.
6
Arrays, codes, and breakdowns of codes are the three levels on which I
present the different objects and configurations that appeared central
within the everyday-worlds of 1926. But is it possible to integrate these
various objects and configurations into a historiographic discourse? Although
I have developed some elementary hypotheses about the relations
that connect the three levels of phenomena, the nature of their interrelatedness
is still not obvious enough to allow us to suggest a new form
of historical writing. Similar reservations apply to the three individual
levels. It is unlikely that different arrays and different codes (let alone
collapsed codes) belonging to one and the same temporal moment ever
enter into relations of a systemic character. And even if this were the case,
we-in the position of immediate historical witnesses-definitely do not
experience everyday-worlds as systems.
Likewise still unanswered is the question of what discursive form
would most successfully enhance the illusion of being-in-a-past-world. I
have opted for the encyclopedic structure of multiple entries, using the
word "entry" to refer to the individual texts that constitute an encyclopedia
or dictionary, but also using it as a way of stressing that everydayworlds
have neither symmetry nor center and can therefore be entered
from many different directions.43 Each entry leads toward an encounter
with an element of concrete historical reality, and each of these elements
is connected to other elements via myriad labyrinthine paths of contiguity,
association, and implication. The arbitrariness of the alphabetical
order in which the entries are presented and the encyclopedic device of
cross-references mimic the nonsystematic character of our everyday experience
and suggest that readers constitute the world of 1926 as an
asymmetrical network,44 as a rhizome rather than as a totality.45
Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idees re(:ues (Dictionary of Received
Ideas)46 is a-certainly unattainable-model for the re-presentation
of past everyday-worlds through a network of entries. Being a mere